The Weekend in Foolish Attention
Bits and bytes of the week
THE BIZARRE TUNNELING OF TIME PASSED. The number fifty-nine is not a big number. As numerals are considered, $59 ain’t that much. Fifty-nine beans in a pot of chili seems weirdly specific and maybe too little for the full meal, yes? Fifty-nine should be relatively easy to keep track of as things go but, for reasons of time and relative distance, organizing the goings-on of fifty-nine years gets funky.
“So, how long have you been back in Chicago? I thought you went to Vegas?”
Oh. How much of THE STORY am I going to tell this time? My brain does some simple math but time is a still-damp sock I can’t quite get pulled up on my foot.
“Uhm… Around a year and half, right?”
I moved back on March 1st. Which year again? 2023 or 2024? Is it really 2025? WTF?
“Why’d you move back?”
Ugh.
“Ah, Vegas does what Vegas does. Went out there and ended up in an absurdly brutal divorce. Spent some time with my family—which, frankly, saved my life—then moved back, what, last year? Something like that.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. That’s Vegas for you. How long since the divorce?”
This question suddenly feels like I’m staring into the deep end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool and without the painted numbers on the sides, I can’t quite fathom how deep the water might be.
“I… I dunno. Like four years, I think.”
It’s been almost exactly three but my mind can’t grasp the actual dates. I later have to pull the book I wrote about it to confirm.
There are certain dates codified in the narrative I tell myself and others that I think are accurate. Spinal meningitis when I was five years old. Graduated high school in 1984. Moved to Chicago randomly in April of 1989. Started the theater in 1992. Edinburgh with the company in 1995. I’m pretty certain of these numbers but I wouldn’t be completely sure unless I did some research.
When did I marry the first time? The date escapes me. How long was the second marriage? It’s a dart throw. If someone were to ask me how long I’ve known Joe, I’d immediately answer “Forty years, thereabouts.” but the reality is closer to thirty-five. There are just so many of these important aspects and events that I see in my mind’s eye but have this sponge-y reference in terms of when during those fifty-nine years they happened and where on that existential timeline they land.
What am I trying to say here? Time is like that swimming pool and we spend an awful lot of it under the water, moving forward or around knowing that at some point we gotta come up for air. We have a brief moment of clarity when we pop out, take that breath, and go back down. I think those are the solid moments in life that we don’t have to scramble to recall.
THE LIMITS TO FAKING IT TO MAKING IT. For the most part I’m a big proponent of the fake it til you make it school of getting things done. Confidence is an elusive quality for the majority of us and the practice of simply puffing yourself up, assuming competence, and trying things out without hesitation has served me well in a lot of situations.
Drive to Chicago fresh out of college with no money, no place to live, no job? Fake it til you make it, baby! Sign a lease on a theater in Lakeview with less than $20.00 in the bank? Fake it til you make it. Move to Vegas on the insistence of a wife desperately seeking another life without any real idea how that shit would work? You get the picture.
It seems that Donald Trump has employed this tactic for decades and, hell, he is the President right now. Except…
Except faking foreign policy during the violent turf wars abroad is not a great fit. It feels like the man is so underwater and out of his element that this only goes sideways. At some point (and, hopefully, sooner rather than later) Trump will take the road taken by another Faker Maker, Elon Musk, who has completely abandoned the whole DOGE thing.
THE ASTROLOGICAL CRAPSHOOT SOMEHOW GETS IT THIS WEEK. Not one to put too much faith in the daily horoscope thing, I still find it interesting to read and project how the nonsense might be in play. Once in a blue moon, some hapless writer or AI nails it.
Most of the time, I’m hired to be the change agent, the wacky asshole with fresh ideas, the Ape in the Library. And that works for me for a honeymoon period everywhere I go… until it doesn’t. Change is difficult for those calcified in the way things have always been. I’m hardwired to risk change at almost any cost because otherwise why show up?
This past week’s strangely prescient horoscope?
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): This isn’t the first time I’ve said that your ideas are ahead of their time. Now I’m telling you again, and adding that your intuitions, feelings and approaches are ahead of their time, too. As usual, your precociousness carries both potential benefits and problems. If people are flexible and smart enough to be open to your innovations, you will be rewarded. If others are rigid and oblivious, you may have to struggle to get the right things done. Here’s my advice: Focus on the joy of carrying out your innovations rather than getting caught up in fighting resistance.
The way to avoid death by a thousand cuts is to refuse to be cut the first time.
BITTEN BY HIS OWN ETHOS. Wesley Lowery was one of the most powerful media allies of the Black Lives Matter movement, demanding that his colleagues abandon objectivity in favor of “moral clarity.” Lowery was the frontman of the band of rockstar journalists who insisted that reporting must be less about facts and more about activism.
Looks like a cohort of young #MeToo feminists have decided to eschew objectivity to wield a different stripe but no less self righteous and strident activism against him. In the Columbia Review Journal we discover that, apparently, women are so easily coerced, have so little ability to say “Nope. I’m not drinking a third tonight,” incapable of having a few drinks and refusing to go to his apartment (even one who was his Bumble date because why would one assume a date as a result of a dating app?) that their only recourse was to destroy the poster child of non-objective journalism.
Now, I don’t celebrate the cancelling of almost anyone (with caveats on that reserved for child pornographers, people who grift the elderly, and zealous crypto-bros) but there is a dark, greasy poetry to seeing a journalist who has made his bones discarding objectivity get hoisted by journalists on a separate ideological track doing to him what he so righteously trumpeted a few years before.
As Kat Rosenfield wrote for The Free Press:
The first rule of consent is: You can’t consent if you were drunk.
The second rule of consent is: You can’t consent if you were drinking.
In truth, there is very little you can meaningfully consent to, as a woman. Drinking a beverage he paid for; climbing alongside him into a cab he called; inviting him into your bedroom after he invites himself into your home. You are just so vulnerable to coercion, so socialized to say “yes” when you really mean “no,” that even the slightest hint of pressure causes your agency to crumble into dust—as does the presence of a power imbalance between yourself and your partner.
On that note, another rule: If you work in a similar field and he’s more professionally successful than you, you definitely can’t consent.
And people wonder why I’m adverse to dating anymore.
CURIOUS… Sitting and writing. Listening to music. The Aerosmith song Dude (Looks Like a Lady) comes on. Great song. It hits me. Is this an eighties version of the crows in Disney’s Dumbo?
WHAT’S THE PREMISE? I wrote awhile back that if you buy the premise, you buy the story.
With that in mind, San Francisco Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers in August in a system that awards a passing C grade to as low as a score of 41 on a 100-point exam.
Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District’s grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.
It seems the premise is that underprivileged kids are simply too marginalized to functionally learn to read, write, and ‘rithmatic. That strikes me as a pretty racist and classist perspective.
WHAT TO WATCH. It sat in my list of stuff to check out for a while and I finally pulled the trigger on Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. During the first episode, it hit me, Is this a movie or a series? because it is really, really good. Plenty of shows in recent memory attempt to expand a one-shot story to stretch it out for eight to ten episodes and become tedious somewhere around episide six but not this one. Great writing, both leads are quite spectacular, and the additions to backgrounds and complications feed fully into the stakes throughout.
Check it out if the conclusion of Mission Impossible leaves wanting some more international spy shit.
And, that, my friends, is the freaking week! June is soon to be busting out all over and, while the anxiety of more chaos from Trump, the territorial and religious wars abroad, the inevitability of another bizarrely hot summer, remember that joining into the circus is a choice, not a requirement. Sometimes, society feels like a pack of angry, hungry toddlers all fighting for the three swings on the swing set and the only sane response is to sit back, let mayhem unfold, and wait until the kids get tired.
Instead of tearing your hair out in handfuls or hiding under the weighted blanket of fear, how about you send this SubStack to, like, three friends and encourage them to subscribe. A coupla bucks doesn’t hurt but is not, in any way, necessary cuz I’ll keep writing until my one typing finger withers and falls off.
What am I trying to say here? Time is like that swimming pool and we spend an awful lot of it under the water, moving forward or around knowing that at some point we gotta come up for air. We have a brief moment of clarity when we pop out, take that breath, and go back down. I think those are the solid moments in life that we don’t have to scramble to recall.
Omg. I just finished my absurdly long comment, & accidentally side swiped it into oblivion. I’ll try to recreate it, but who fucking knows if I am capable at this age.
At 55 I am right behind ya. Don’t wait up, I have no coordination, very little balance, & neuropathy destroys any proprioceptive input. I’ll stay back here languidly moseying.
I agree, it is very bizarre how time stretches, condenses, & blurs the further one gets from an occurrence. Pair that with post menopausal or manopausal brain fog & looking through the rear view mirror becomes an exercise of unexpected perplexity & questionable depth perception.
When I was young, my visual memories & my auditory memories were often linked & all were crystal clear. But now my auditory memories echo unattached & my visual memories sometimes feel like vertigo. And now I find myself Mr. Magooing through life.
Like your recurring dream, I have a waking image that stays in my mind that I believe represents my soul, my lifetime, & my memories. I am sitting alone in an empty, beautiful church. (Because of course. No matter how far I limp away, CHURCH remains a beckoning seemingly lovely facade that hides the putrid decay that rots beneath its surface.)
I am ageless (sometimes young, sometimes old, sometimes ageless), happily looking up in awe. I am surrounded by countless stained glass windows, depicting significant scenes of my life. Suddenly, without warning, all the windows shatter inward one by one, raining shards of colored glass all over me & the sanctuary.
I am alarmed & wounded, but start the daunting task of gathering the bigger pieces, trying to identify & reassemble the scenes like a series of puzzles, ignoring the bleeding cuts on my hands. My efforts are infinitesimally successful & largely futile, so eventually I resign myself to collecting all the shards, even the tiniest ones that are crushed as I walk, to create a kaleidoscope.
I view the rest of my life through this kaleidoscope, which creates images that are ever-changing, shifting & beautiful in different ways than the scenes that were previously solid. Even though they are shattered, broken, crushed, salvaged shards, the glass reflects my lifetime & remains colorful & beautiful in a new way. Every once in a while I stumble across another piece & decide whether it fits in one of the puzzles or gets tossed into the kaleidoscope pile.
This church setting remains in my mind, but sometimes instead it morphs into a funhouse maze with distorted mirrors that I’m desperately trying to escape. But still the same thing still happens with the mirrors shattering, & me trying to collect all the pieces.
In both scenarios, I am alone, but am fearful that someone else will enter the sanctuary or the maze & further crush or steal the shards of my life before I can gather them all.
Typical that my mind conjures up an impossible important task to be completed before someone sinister enters the scene.
BTW, I love “Dude Looks Like A Lady,” Steven Tyler really goes all out, so to speak. The only downside is I end up destroying my vocal cords attempting to replicate his ad libs at the end. That’s the part that reminds me of the crows “Ca-ca-ca-ca Cow Cow!”